travel

Glacier National Park and Three Rules

Mountain goats and the rules of hiking were still on our minds when we touched down at Detroit Metro and started our trek to offsite parking.

Those mountain goats had been easily a half mile away and hundreds of feet above us when we first saw them. In Glacier National Park, none of this is rare. Lots of mountain goats, lots of things far away, lots of things way above your head…even though you’re already a mile or more high to start with.

What we weren’t ready for was how much better they were at covering the vertical and horizontal distances. We were on the Highline Trail, and we’d taken a detour to see Grinnell Glacier from above. So, in addition to a 11.5 mile hike, we added a 1000ft climb over an extra mile to get this view.

It was completely worth it, and the goats agreed. The difference was our detour probably took us an hour of hiking. They did it in minutes.

The rest of the hike didn’t reveal much more wildlife. Just spectacular views, a bunch of golden chipmunks, a mule deer, and lots of people. It was great, and I recommend it to anyone, as long as you don’t mind unhappy endings: The last four miles has about a 2400ft drop, or almost 20% grade — that’s the kind of steep where if you’re on a paved road you see warning signs showing the silhouette of an eighteen-wheeler plummeting down the silhouette of Mt. Everest.

So overall the Highline experience was kind of like watching the Princess Bride all the way to Inigo Montoya winning the fight (sorry if that’s a spoiler) and Wesley and Buttercup reuniting, and then instead of them all hopping on beautiful white horses and riding to freedom you find yourself teleported into Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and everybody’s getting stabbed, or buried to the neck and left to die, or baked into pies and fed to their mom.

Anyway, we were sore for a couple of days, but in those days we still did a lot more hiking, saw bighorn sheep close up (maybe too close), moose at fifty yards (better), grizzlies across a big lake (perfect!), and lots of mountains and waterfalls and people.

One of our favorite people was Linnea, the park ranger who we joined for our last, mellow hike, and who taught us all kinds of interesting things, among which were her three rules of hiking, as taught to her by her dad and field-tested over the years since.

Rule 1: Don’t fall.

Rule 2: Don’t throw rocks at people below you.

Rule 3: If you’re scared, you’re going the wrong way.

We followed all of those rules that week, and we were still talking about how not to fall on trails or on moving walkways in airports when my boot lace, which I hadn’t tied all the way up, got caught in those little fork slots at the end of one of those walkways and sent me flying — not very far, because the bootlace wasn’t THAT long — knee, then chest, then face first onto the very flat, very smooth floor at Detroit Metro. I was the only one laughing as I rolled over, even though I was also the only one whose knee was bleeding and whose backpack had spit up its contents.

Louis Pasteur said, “chance favors only the prepared mind.” Shoelaces had already been invented by the time he started heating milk — probably not mountain goat milk, but milk — to kill bacteria, but there were no airports or hiking boots, so he couldn’t have had my particular situation in mind. But he was right. You can make your own luck, good OR bad. But you should try not to make your own karma.

Not throwing rocks at people below you is a good way to start. But don’t fall either.

The Michigan Author’s Workshop

I had a great time at the Michigan Author’s Workshop last week, and got a chance to look around Midland — a place I’ve never been — the next morning before heading home. So, some photos!

The talk took place at the Midland Center for the Arts, a lovely place. My hosts (Helen and Chris) and co-presenter — poet David (D.R.) James — were excellent too.

Seven Saints and Sinners — Watching over me, not helpfully

We had some tech difficulties (“Oh, about that HDMI port we said you could use. It doesn’t actually work!” “Um. Okay?”), but in the end we got a big ol’ TV in there and watched episodes of “The Good Place” instead of my talk.

A saint — Do good sales mean a good presentation? (Maybe? Probably? I hope?)

Not really, but it was a close thing. In the end, I was able to show images — important when talking about comics — and people seemed happy with my discussion of comics storytelling, its tools, and the research process for Hawking. That is, if “book sales > than number of attendees” is a valid measure of happiness, anyway.

It ran late, so I stayed over night and the next morning, before returning home, I visited the Dow Gardens and the Alden B. Dow Home & Studio.

Alden B. Dow exterior — The chimney is built for climbing. (In a less risk-averse age, anyway.)

You can’t take photos inside, so you’ll just have to go see it for yourself. I’d heard about the home for years, so was grateful to get a chance to finally visit. Definitely worth it!

A fine event in a fine mid-Michigan town. Thanks again to Saginaw Valley State University. I’d go again!

Ending Hawking

Hey, there’s an ARC giveaway of Hawking going on right now! Enter today: https://bit.ly/2ZypPLA

I hope you get one, and in case you do here’s a quick note to say congratulations, thanks, and…we changed the ending. Not much, but enough that you’ll notice the difference between what you’re holding now and what your readers will see in July.

(Well, that and the “Hardcover and Full Color Everywhere by Aaron Polk” thing. You’ll love this book in its final form.)

Here’s how that happened: In a television writer’s room there’s a fairly common occurence: someone pitches a plot-twist or a joke, and other writers nod. But if too many nod in agreement and say “right, that’s just what I was thinking” they’ll toss it out and think some more. Why? Because they know they’ve come up with the exact same thing their savvy audience will expect at that point in the story.

Something similar happened to us, and it was brought about by the sad occasion of Hawking’s death. As we revisited our original ending in light of his passing, we realized that what might have worked soon after we first visited Cambridge to meet him** in 2013 was not as good five years later. The imagery that seemed fresh and appropriate then? It no longer did. Our sensitivity reader made this point as well, pushing us further, and we took heed. The result is a closing sequence that’s subtly different from what’s in the ARC.

It’s now more abstract, leaves more to your imagination, and keeps you in Hawking’s mind—in Hawking’s world—for just a little longer. Perhaps even after you close the book.

I hope you enjoy the story, and come back for more on July 2nd!

**And by soon, I mean I came up with the ending, in outline form, while still in England. In fact, I wrote it down in the rain (England, right?) in a tiny notebook while I was on Darwin’s Sandwalk, pictured above. It was a wonderful trip.

Scotland: I visited and I hope you get to visit too

Random notes from a trip to Scotland…

For Ann Arbor area friends: Driving in Scotland is much like Huron River Drive, but all the time and hillier and curvier and faster and with steeper drop offs on both sides of the road and large trucks coming in from the wrong side just as the road narrows to one lane. And sheep. For hours.

After a day of seeing amazing feats of Neolithic construction — villages of stone, standing stones of stone, burial mounds of stone, tons of finely honed stone slabs piled on more tons of stoned and finished to near perfection and placed such that they’ve stood for thousands of years — it took four of us three tries before we could cut through our dessert tart using a sharpened stainless steel knife which someone else made, sharpened, and brought to our table.

We toured a bunch of distilleries, and while this didn’t make us experts in whisky-making, we got well-versed in the process and the generic tour, written from memory and then enhanded with real nouns:

To make whisky you need four kinds of stuff [1]. Grow some of the stuff [2], germinate it, and then stop germinating it by heating. That’s called malting, and you can use other stuff [3] as the heat source if you want.

(Aside: Dry peat, which is basically fetal coal which needs a few million years more gestation, has no scent. It’s the damp peat that you add later that gives the Islay malts their characteristic flavor.)

Now dry and turn the stuff [4], then run it through a thing [5], separating it into husk, grist, and flour. All these parts get mixed with stuff [6] in the mashing stage, and successive washes of varying temperatures extract sugar from the barley. The leftover mash is turned into feed for the approximately 6.022×10^23 sheep and cows in Scotland.

The sugar water that the livestock doesn’t get is the stuff [7], and this heads into washbacks (sometimes made of wood like larch, sometimes metal), and at last, add the stuff [8]. Fermentation begins and, depending on who’s doing it, will last from 40-100 hours. In the process it releases carbon dioxide, and if you stick your head in the washback and take a big sniff you’ll regret it for the next half hour.

At the end of the process you basically have strong beer (7-10% alcohol) which actually tasted more like wine. Up to this point the processes for making beer, wine, and whisky are virtually identical. The difference comes in the next step, where if you do it wrong for beer or wine the end result tastes bad and if you do it wrong for whisky the end result will kill you [9]. Avoid tragedy by running the stuff [10] through the pot and the washback stills successively. These are made of copper and condense out the spirit, and you do this over and over until you get past the foreshots [11] and get to the heart. Carefully monitor the process and draw off the heart, recycling the heads and the tails [12] in later runs to extract all the good stuff. All of this stuff flows through a spirit safe, which is kept under lock and key so nobody can swipe any spirit and sell it without paying taxes.

The fetal whisky now goes into things [13]. The first thing is always made from American bourbon cask oak, charred on the inside first. Then the whisky sits for a minimum of three years, 2% evaporating each year — that 2% is the angel’s share.

(The barrels are monitored closely, since a) they’re valuable, and b) still not taxable, since for a 10 year whisky the accumulated angel’s share would be ~20% and nobody wants to pay taxes on stuff lost to the textbook definition of an act of god.)

Stuff [14] enters the cask to replace the lost whisky, adding stuff [15]. Sometimes there’s another barrel/cask used, typically Spanish sherry, for finishing. Sometimes it just goes straight to the bottle, from which everyone drinks the stuff [16] and is happy.

1. water, barley, yeast, and heat

2. barley

3. peat

4. barley

5. mill

6. water

7. wort

8. yeast

9. …or merely blind you.

10. wash

11. aka the head, aka the dangerous part

12. aka the feints

13. barrels

14. air

15. character

16. Scotch

Sign coming into Edinburgh: “No hard shoulder next 150 yards.” I expect if I’d looked backwards it would have said “No hard shoulder next 1362 miles.” (It should have.)